An Action Kickback film by Eric Jacobus

If you’re a connoisseur of fight scenes, then you’d know that many fight scenes in this modern movie making age are a compilation of cuts and edits that highlight the actor’s movements. Some times the edits are to emphasize certain movements, but most of the time they are done in a way that makes an actor (who doesn’t know how to fight) look like they know how to fight. True martial arts prowess is not demonstrated through a fight scene with all these jarring cuts and edits, but rather through wider angles and (if you dare it) longer shots.

Since we boast that Rise And Fail’s action centers around fights that do showcase martial arts ability, we tend to prefer these long shots that allow the audience to fully grasp the extent of our actor’s skills.

While this sounds like a great idea, the problem is that with longer shots, there are a lot more places to make mistakes – one wrong move and you have to start the whole sequence all over again.

Watch this video to see for yourself the effort (and number of takes) it took to make a single long shot.

Really makes you appreciate these long fight scenes a lot more, doesn’t it?

During the course of filming, we were also able to find time to interview Sean Rochford, who plays the role of “Joe” in Rise And Fail.

Sadly, many of Sean’s stunts were cut from the final cut after being deemed “too mind-boggling” by the editors (evidently the footage was shown to a cage filled with hamsters to gauge the “awesome-quality”: only 1 of the 400 hamsters survived, the rest died from their heads imploding from awesome overload). But don’t worry, many of Sean’s other scenes were able to grace the final cut.

Also, if you missed our Dec 1 blog post, we are excited to announce that our fearless leader Eric Jacobus has started his own personal blog called The Actionist, where he shares his insights on the choreography of fight scenes and the process of creating an independent action film. And since Eric has far superior intel, he has already blogged about this very same Interview with Sean Rochford. So feel free to check out his post as well (we won’t be offended).

And remember, we still need help getting this film finished. We have a Kickstarter campaign up now, so if you’d like to help us get this movie get made, this is your opportunity! A $30 donation gets you a signed copy of the DVD (complete with bonus footage & special features), plus even more rewards for higher donation thresholds, so there’s no reason to not donate today!

We have just released a brand new trailer for Rise And Fail! This more official trailer is longer and explains a bit more of the story… actually, I’ll just shut up and let you to see for yourself. Enjoy!

Our IndieGoGo campaign is drawing to a close (only 2 days left!), and we are still sadly far from our fundraising goal. However, we have found another opportunity to raise some of those needed funds in the form of “The Butterfly Effect” contest on Tenlegs.com.

Essentially this is a film contest (other artistic categories are included but judged separately) with a grand prize of $5,000! Winning that money would be of great help to us, but we need YOUR help!

All you need to do is click the image below and cast your vote for Rise And Fail!

Voting ends this Sunday October 23rd, so please take 5min out of your day and get your vote in now!

Throughout their history as a stunt & fight choreography team, The Stunt People have often heard the line:

“I bet they sped that up“.

This would imply that the people in the fights in question aren’t actually moving as quickly as they appear to be, and require the aid of post-filming effects to achieve the speed and effects ultimately seen in the video.

However, The Stunt People are proud to say that they do not actually use such post-filming effects in their fight choreography. Every video and fight sequence you see from them were really filmed as fast as they look. In fact, insisting that the fights are sped up is actually a compliment to how fast they are.

That said, there are times in which the process of “speed ramping” does produce quite an awesome effect. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, “speed ramping” is the process of changing the frame rate of a shot to speed up or slow down the action. It produces a sort of “time slowing” or “time speeding-up” effect. You see the effect used in movies like “The Matrix” or games like “Max Payne”, in the form of “bullet-time”.

While The Stunt People don’t speed up their fights, there are times in which the “speed-ramping urge” kicks in. And when it does, this is what we get:

If like me, you were raised in the 90’s, I imagine you might remember Johnny Yong Bosch from his tenure as “Adam Park”, the Black Ranger on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Or perhaps you know him from his many (and more recent) voice acting roles in anime and video games since then (including Ichigo from Bleach, Vash the Stampede from Trigun, Nero from Devil May Cry 4, etc).

But do you know what Johnny’s doing next? We do!

That’s right! Johnny Yong Bosch will be playing lead villain “Torch” in our Rise And Fail movie! In between filming, we had a chance to talk to him more about his role and experience working on the film, and here’s what he had to say: